The Media Trust—a provider of data security for Web sites and mobile apps—today announced the release of SMART, a suite of SaaS-based solutions that look to assure the quality and performance of digital ads. SMART—which stands for scan, measure, analyze, resolve, and track—is designed to provide publishers with real-time control over their ads in order to best serve their audiences.

SMART relies on the Media Trust's suite of ad tag monitoring and alerting services, which are powered by scanning technology capable of scanning more than 30 million ad tags. These ad tags are evaluated against a database of creative and technical policies; if an ad exceeds a policy threshold, it is flagged and a real-time alert containing information on resolving the problem is generated. SMART examines ad tags both prelaunch and in flight and also alerts upstream partners in real time of any issues.

"There are best practices that need to be…known and then attained to make the digital ecosystem continue to function effectively. SMART is there to be a top-line driver across our clients to start to meet that objective," says Chris Olson, CEO and cofounder of the Media Trust. "Once that objective is met, then there should be a following reduction in the use of ad blocking; publishers should have better consumer experiences on their Web sites whether it's ads or other third-party codes that are causing the issue; there should just be a cleaner, faster, better experience, and then cross-platform capabilities…should improve as well."

SMART addresses four major areas of concern for publishers: security, data leakage, ad quality, and ad performance. The solution reports on any unknown, suspicious, and malicious activity, including out-of-browser redirects, and it provides information on the life span, utilization, and purpose of authorized and unauthorized cookies. In addition, it reports on fraudulent, offensive, competitive, blacklisted, or channel-conflict ads, as well as any auto-play audio and video, pop-ups and pop-unders, and shaking or flashing appearance. Finally, it provides information on download size, number of connections, and latency.

"SMART is very geared toward advertising, but the SMART product is somewhat of a metaphor to all of the third-party code that makes up the digital ecosystem today, and it's just one of the pieces to start to enable a better consumer experience," Olson says. "That's really what the concept of SMART is about—by enabling the better consumer experience, publishers and then the ad ecosystem around it are going to be able to better monetize the digital ecosystem, they're going to have a cleaner running experience so more consumers will visit their site, and I think over the long term you're going to see fewer policy and regulatory violations and a reduction in ad blocking because consumers will be more open to having ads if they aren't interrupting their experience."